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Regular Expressions with .NET
by Dan Appleman and Daniel Appleman - Daniel Appleman

List Price: $14.95
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  • Average Customer Review: Based on 15 reviews.
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: 1187380
Product Description

With the release of Visual Studio .NET, a great deal of attention has been placed on the Visual Studio .NET languages, Visual Basic .NET, C# and Managed C++ (not to mention the dozens of others under development by various companies). It might surprise you to know that yet another language is built into Visual Studio - one that can be used in conjunction with VB .NET, C# or any other .NET language. A language that is terse to such a degree that the term "concise" does not come close to describing its brevity of syntax. A language so cryptic that it can take hours to truly understand a single line of code.

Yet it is a language that can save you hours upon hours of time in any application that involves text processing or data validation. It is a language that can perform complex data validation tasks in a single line of code. It is a language that performs sophisticated search and replace operations on strings. It is a language that should be part of every programmer's toolbox.

The language is the "Regular Expression Language" - a language designed to parse and manipulate blocks of text. This ebook is intended to be a complete introduction to Regular Expressions that can even be read and understood by programmers who have never heard of them. It is also intended to help experienced Regular Expression programmers come up to speed quickly on the .NET implementation of Regular Expressions.

Featured Customer Reviews

Best $15 I ever spent, July 20, 2005
I've read through it once, and I'll definitely have to read through it again. And probably at least once more after that. It's the perfect size for a download - small enough that I could handle printing it out, and I still have the .pdf file for when I need to search it. It's pretty dense, and there's a lot of "You need to understand 3 things about xxWhatever, and I'll explain the 3rd thing later on", but let's face it, RegEx is a VERY complicated, meaty topic. He's got an appendix to handle getting all the escape codes etc in one place for reference. The best thing is that he includes a link to free software, a RegEx tester that you can download so you can test his examples to see how they work, and then, of course, test your own expressions. If you are really new to Regular Expressions, Jeffrey E.F. Friedl has written a 430 page book, Mastering Regular Expressions, which you might also want to consider.

I was looking for something better., June 26, 2004
If all I had wanted was an introduction to Regular Expressions in .NET, this book would have been fine, I guess. However, I had already learned quite a bit from Microsoft's documentation, and was hoping for a clear elucidation of a few points that MS had glossed over, to wit, how to use balancing expressions and alternating constructs, and also how to do some tricky things such as finding everything that doesn't match a given pattern, etc. Appleman indeed addresses the balancing expressions and alternating constructs in greater depth than the MS documentation, but his treatise is somewhat inadequate. He gives one elaborate example which uses both constructions, but fails to explain how to generalize from his example; and the regex pattern in his example itself, which is supposed to return the contents of successively nested parentheses, is not a general solution at all, but only works on a fairly narrow set of test cases. I think this stems from him having a less-than-profound understanding of regular expressions himself: he all but admits that he simply banged his head against the wall of Microsoft's documentation until he figured stuff out. Can't blame him for trying; this stuff is some of the most abstruse and dreadful stuff I've ever seen, in thirty years of professional programming. I just wish I could find something a bit more comprehensive (and comprehensible) from somebody who REALLY knows what the underlying interpreter/compiler does. All the better stuff that I've seen out there is unaware of the particulars of the .Net environment. Bottom line: since you can't get a refund on the e-book, save your money and re-read the Microsoft Stuff a few more times.

Somewhat disappointing, November 19, 2003
I'm a bit disappointed in this book. I find regular expressions to be a challenging subject, and I was looking for a clear tutorial that would start with the basics and work its way up to more complex expressions. On that basis, I bought this book.

The book's explanation of the basics are a bit thin for my tastes. For example, it jumps into groups and backreferencing on page 11, while I'm still struggling with more basic concepts. If you already 'get' regular expressions, this book is probably a good text. However, if you are struggling with the fundamentals, as I am, you may view its explanation as being weak.

Another Perspective, November 07, 2003
I am a long time fan of Dan Appleman. What he did to bring the Windows API out of the closet and available to all of us journeymen developers was profound.

That being said I'd like to suggest that Dan's book be the next book you buy after getting 'Visual Basic.Net Text Manipulation Handbook'.

Good work, needs more examples, July 22, 2003
Very good primer, but needed more examples with "real-world" relevance to better demonstrate some of the more complex features of regular expressions.

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